WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is proud to announce the release of A Nation Born in a Day: Visions of the American Founding, a new collection of essays directly challenging the claims of the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Published with Stone Tower Press, edited by ACTA President Dr. Michael Poliakoff, and featuring a foreword by Sir Niall Ferguson, the volume brings together ten distinguished historians and scholars, including the late Gordon Wood, to explore the events of 1776 that set forth principles of liberty, equality, and self-government that changed the course of world history and continue to guide us today. That foundational narrative, well-understood for two and a half centuries, is given new life and urgency by ten of the nation’s finest modern scholars of American history and politics.
Released in 2019, the 1619 Project offers a bleak depiction of the United States as a nation founded on racism and white supremacy. Despite serious academic rebuttals, its destructive influence continues to reverberate in classrooms and syllabi nationwide, even worldwide. Its endurance illustrates the danger of allowing activism to substitute for scholarship.
A Nation Born in a Day sets the record straight. The essays provide nuanced histories of American capitalism, slavery, and abolitionism; and Frederick Douglass’s and Robert Frost’s visions of the American story. Their scholarly examination of American history and politics—one attentive to both its achievements and its failures—recenters America’s fundamental dedication to liberty, unity, and justice.
“This volume is one of ACTA’s gifts to the nation for its 250th anniversary,” said ACTA President Michael Poliakoff. “But the Declaration of Independence was itself a gift to all of humanity. The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ shook the foundations of the world, heralding the transfer of power from princes and kings to where it appropriately belongs: the people. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rightfully saw the Declaration as part of the ‘promissory note’ for every American. That promissory note continues to guide the nation past its failures and toward a more perfect union. A Nation Born in a Day is a rigorous, essential defense of the enduring ideas that shaped our past and will continue to shape our future.”
Since its founding in 1995, ACTA has made restoring American history and civic education a central part of its mission. ACTA believes that students deserve to encounter a full history of America, replete with tragedies, triumphs, failures, recovery, and reforms, one always grounded in America’s extraordinary constitutional order and dedication to renewal and progress. ACTA’s credo then, as now, is to consider the question: What can we learn from America’s past that will help us preserve the Republic and strengthen its future?
The book is available for purchase from Stone Tower Press’s website.
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